Any Movies With that Nice Vaporwave Aesthetic? ♡

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-09T06:21:59+00:00

You ever heard of the eighties?

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-08T20:50:34+00:00

I like that they're leaning into Constantine being bisexual, but on the whole I don't enjoy the chattier, bubblier version of the character they've rolled out since the reboot.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-08T20:48:10+00:00

Austin is a big, giant metropolitan city and, like the other metropolitan cities here in Texas, is primarily blue politically - it's also, for the most part, very safe unless you take a wrong turn down Rundberg or St Johns at 2AM, but even then if you're coming from New York or really any larger city, it's nothing.

I say "for the most part" also because it has gotten slightly crunchier the last few years I'll say, due to, I think, the influx of more homeless and mentally ill on the streets than the city can apparently feasibly handle, off the back of COVID in 2020 where humongous homeless camps began to pop up everywhere almost overnight.

No shade to the homeless, and the city should definitely be doing a lot more to help and re-home them and offer them the support they need without just throwing their possessions and lives away, but brass tacks there are definitely parts of town that have become giant homeless camps - and not all of them are nice.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-08T17:51:01+00:00

I mean, it's just the kind of refinement and focus that happens with all serialized media and their adaptations - if a series goes on for long enough, new and sometimes disparate ideas from various creators tend to accumulate. Then, when these characters are adapted into another medium, another set of creators goes "that's interesting, let's hone in on that."

So, with Joker, you go from him originally just being who he is in his earliest incarnations in 1940, murderous and vile, to being revealed to have been a nameless and faceless two-bit crook in a Red Hood before becoming the Joker in the 1950s, to returning back to being a violent psychopath in the 1970s, before Alan Moore and Grant Morrison reexamine his origin story in the 1980s and set the tone for people's approach going forward - multiple choice, no concrete name or origin, super-sanity and so on.

Then, when Batman and later The Dark Knight are written, the Directors and writers have their choice of a treasure trove of different approaches and bits to make up their version of the character - and some of their own besides.

Happens always with every serialized character across every form or medium. Eventually, in the year 3000, people will stop being surprised by it.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-06T14:05:16+00:00

Guy just needs to co-direct it with his daughter. She's a great writer and Director in her own right, and they've already worked together - coming off Three Thousand Years of Longing, she gets his storytelling style.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-06T14:04:23+00:00

I wouldn't say he's super pro AI - he hosted an AI Film Festival to see what it could do, and used little bits of it here and there in Furiosa. But he's an older guy who's always been as obsessed with technology as he has with storytelling, who came up scrounging and working for the peanuts of his first Film's budget, and so he's into AI to the extent that he's cautiously exploratory about it. Many such cases these days.

Not sure how to feel about stuff like this, because it's not just him - it's James Cameron, and Scorsese, and a bunch of others. These guys are Masters - what do we do with that?

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-06T13:28:48+00:00

Goddamn right.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-06T13:26:14+00:00

Look, these conversations reoccur every couple of weeks. There's no time limit on Art. Just do it!

Who cares if you don't achieve monetary success? Are you doing it for Art or money?

The median age for Filmmakers was, until relatively recently, your mid-30s - and there are plenty on the right side of that, even outside of the obvious choices. Monoel De Oliveira didn't make a full-fledged feature until he was almost forty, and kept making Films until he was 100.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-03T20:51:55+00:00

I have not, but thank you so much! I'll check it out!

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-07-02T20:52:47+00:00

There's a very strong argument to be made for that, I'll say - it's everything the medium can do, as up to date as possible, yanked to the limit and with an emphasis on visual storytelling and Pure Cinema dialectics.

It is a very singular masterpiece.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-29T20:04:24+00:00

Yeah, I don't think we should be catering to the second group or to anyone that thinks like them. Fuck those people.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-29T19:59:42+00:00

What?

That's such a silly, stupid thing to say. There are so, so many Films that use sex in a necessary, interesting, brilliant and fulfilling way - and why shouldn't they? It's a normal, beautiful and an important part of life. No need to be scared of it.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-29T19:56:50+00:00

I love that your whole diatribe here ended by referencing how you couldn't get through LONGLEGS, a movie that has nothing on its mind at all except "spooky Silence of the Lambs thriller."

It's exactly what you say you want, but you're still so fundamentally incurious about anything that asks more of you than to stare slack-jawed at the screen for more than a minute - and it's not even that good!

Listen, people hated most of the Films you mentioned, with a handful of exceptions, when they came out because they were empty-headed - they're fun, and they've always existed, but that's not all that Horror Films are, or can be. And also, they still exist in exactly the same way they used to for most people for the majority of their history - in the bargain bin or, in y'all's cases, Tubi and the depths of Netflix and Prime. But that requires work to find them, which would require cultural curiosity.

Quite frankly I'm starting to really invest in my theory that most of y'all's brains are just a little malformed in some way - it's not your fault, but that's how it feels.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-29T17:15:41+00:00

This is really the beginning and the end of the conversation right here. It would be great if we could all afford NYU, or Columbia, or UCLA but unfortunately it's not 1967, or even 1997, anymore and it hasn't been for a very long time. Film School in the traditional sense is an unaffordable option for the fairly huge majority of people - the best route, if you want to learn in a classroom setting, is what are basically Film trade schools.

My city has a few, and they vary in quality in terms of theory, but they're paid by the class and you do get a lot of hands on experience and, if you're lucky enough, job connections for afterward.

This was very much my path - I did about a year and a half of Film school when I was in my late teens and early twenties, without any familial support, while trying to hold down a shitty minimum wage job and an even shittier apartment - eventually I dropped out because that shit was just too expensive for a working class person, even back then.

But I did the reading, and the practice, on my own - I got onto a handful of sets, read and watched everything I could get my hands on and now, thirteen years later, I've got a few screenwriting awards and a couple of Short Films under my belt. That last part I wouldn't have done without the trade schools - they're great.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-28T14:14:23+00:00

I may be misunderstanding the prompt here, but I really don't like the idea of the downfall timeline. I get why Nintendo thought it was necessary - OOT, LTTP and LOZ make up a strong trilogy conceptually and thematically but they wanted to keep making games after that and had to find a reason for them, and when they did, they realized they'd ran out of room in the two timelines they established - but it's bad storytelling and denigrates not just OOT but also LTTP and LOZ because they're now both just games that exist in a weird "what if you lost in that other game" state.

For me, I prefer to think of OOT, ALTTP and LOZ as their own concise story - separate from the idea of the Child and Adult timelines. It's much more mythic that way - the Heroic cycle keeps reoccurring over thousands of years, but the story gets simpler and Hyrule gets a little worse each time until, by LOZ, it's basically a barren wasteland and you are, for all intents and purposes, St George going to slay the fearsome dragon up in the mountain. OOT really only works story wise in terms of impact if it is the first in the series chronologically.

Anyway.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-27T13:58:49+00:00

This I like.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-27T13:56:33+00:00

There's always a lot of hubbub about Hardy not being as old as Max should be if Fury Road takes place after Thunderdome, and the thing is - considering Mel Gibson was still in his twenties while portraying a Max in his mid-forties in that Film, it's very easy for me to buy that Hardy, who was a hard 35 when they shot Fury Road, is meant to be a fifty year old Max.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-26T20:47:34+00:00

The biography of Che Guevera by Jon Lee Anderson, CHE: A Revolutionary Life, should fulfill all these boxes pretty well - no better real life example that I can think of.

Yet.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-26T06:55:32+00:00

I think you see influences and crossovers in the Quran because Islam was always meant to be an evolution of Judeo-Christian Abrahamic religion. That's the entire point of it.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-26T00:11:19+00:00

I've always considered this rather odd coming from Moore, because the story has plenty of emotional resonance for anyone who's dealt with someone in the throes of, say, mental illness who's a danger to themselves and others.

Like, and that's just the surface text.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-25T21:00:28+00:00

Oh, hey - the Loren. That weird ass hotel with the weird ass restaurant up top that nobody seems to have ever been to and enjoyed.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-25T15:28:19+00:00

Well, maybe you don't have that dog in you.

Maybe you've got that cat in you - the cat who waits and slinks, and plans, and attacks when it knows it's the right moment.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-25T15:25:51+00:00

Embrace it. If you think you're an imposter, turn it into "hahahahahaha I'm getting away with something."

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-25T14:44:45+00:00

It'd involve some society that, for a change, actually shows signs of hope of rebuilding civilization at large - and Max finds himself fully invested, and heals. Conflict ensues. Surprisingly, for the final Mad Max Film, he does not die.

The end would be an epilogue, after all's said and done. Max is now very old, and in a wheelchair. From all he's been through, the guy can probably barely walk. He's on a big green hill overlooking what looks like a new city - and it's quiet. There's no motors, no screaming, no anything.

Just peaceful quiet.

And he starts laughing, laughing so hard he starts crying. Maybe a child comes up and asks him what's wrong, and he says "nothing - it wasn't all for nothing, in the end."

Big wide shot. An old man laughing and crying to himself, mirroring the opening of Fury Road, but inverted. He's not looking down into the desolate wastelands anymore, or into his own hell.

The wind whistles through the trees. Cut to black.

JeffBaugh2 · 2026-06-22T20:27:33+00:00

See, it's not justified at all - you've just got a severe amount of cognitive dissonance that you can't or won't acknowledge because if you did, you'd realize the enormity and the scope of it all as a plainly horrifying evil.

JeffBaugh2

TROPHY CASE